printing to a 1055 CM Designjet runs out of disk

[darjr]

Product: DesignJet 1055cm

So I foolishly decided to buy and tinker with a truly ancient DesignJet 1055cm. It's been something of an adventure, but I am able to use the printer for some basic tasks. In order to get it to work I had to:

• Buy and install a replacement ink tube system since the seals on the original had long since deteriorated.
• Buy and install a replacement carriage belt since the original had turned to dust.
• Get new ink.
• Buy a gazillion print heads and send most of them back to sellers until I found a set that worked.
• Buy and install more memory, mostly because it was cheap and I felt like it. Interestingly the printer reports more memory (128 MB + 128 MB) than the driver seems to know how to use (128 MB total?).
• Use a Linux machine to print through cups because none of the Windows drivers seem to work on modern versions of Windows. They crash.

Anyway, I tried to print an image. It was 'receiving' for a very long time, and then the printer erred saying that there was no more space on disk. This surprised me - why would the printer need disk space to print? Surely the host is good for something. Further, my understanding was that the EIO hard disk was there to provide postscript support, and wasn't actually working memory.

So, does anyone know how to print images on this thing? Or how to massage the Windows drivers to work on Windows 10? So far it seems to work OK printing architectural drawings, which is what I bought it to do, but I figured I'd have some fun with it.

As an aside, I pulled out the EIO disk and it said 5 GB on the label, but when plugged in to a computer reports as 3.25 GB. Further, there's no partition table and it seems like there's a single vxworks vxext filesystem. I haven't investigated trying to read its contents yet.

Yes, I know I'm dumb for bothering to mess with something so old. But I've been having a good time.

[D Hook]

These are great legacy printers so no, not dumb to try to get it working again. I've used a few of these over the years, mostly for line drawings.  And the last one I had was running on a windows 10 laptop.  Sold it not too long ago because I had other printers that were newer and didn't need it anymore.  I used mine mostly for line drawings but did print a few images, too.  It's getting harder to keep these older printers working but if you enjoy a challenge, they're worth it, IMO.  My favorite printer from this era is the Designjet 5500PS.  It did beautiful images and could do everything I needed at the time.  It was easy to maintain and not too expensive to operate and the drivers were readily available.

What type of image file are you trying to print?  Gif, Jif, Bmp?  And how large is the file?  Bmp is usually the easiest for the printer to handle.  There should be an option in the print menu to print the image as a bitmap, if you haven't already tried it.  There should also be an option on the print menu page to process the file in the computer rather than the printer.  This should speed things up.  Don't recall what the exact wording of the option is.  You can also try converting the file to a PDF and try printing that way.  

Also, which driver are you using?  I've had luck using the Designjet 5500PS driver to print to my 1055CM Plus.  If gives a few more menu options.  Might be worth trying.  Also, you can try using the Windows 7 driver instead of the Windows 10 driver.  

There's a few threads on this forum that speak to how to print images.  Some apply to the 1050C, some to the 1055 CM and some to the 1055CM Plus.  Most of the differences between them is the amount of memory and the size of the hard drive.

https://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/DesignJet-Large-Format-Printers-Digital-Press/Printing-color-images-on...

https://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/DesignJet-Large-Format-Printers-Digital-Press/1050C-on-Windows-10/td-

p/5877890

There are larger hard drives you can buy on Ebay that come with the HP software pre-loaded.  I believe LPS Computers also still sells them.  Prices vary. They're usually about 40G WD hard drives.  I've had good luck buying from LPS in the past but I also check Ebay regularly for needed parts.  OEM printheads are getting harder to find and I've stayed away from using rebuilt or remanufactured printheads as they never seem to work.  I believe HP uses a proprietary file system so just using an off the shelf HD and cloning the original is a bit iffy and way beyond my skill level.  But the sellers of these disks must have figured it out.  You might do a search on this forum about cloning and see what comes up.    

There's probably more threads on this subject on this forum if you do a search.  Also a search on Google can bring you more info.  

Best of luck getting it working.  Let us know how it comes out.